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Saturday, February 7, 2015

Basement Makeover: Part 2

I finished sprucing up our basement bathroom a few days ago, but I struggled with photos since there is no natural light and only a single bulb in the ceiling fixture. Then, a friend gave me some tips on adding and diffusing additional light, which helped tremendously. So, here it is, the basement bathroom!Here's the deal with the bathroom; it's unfinished, with exposed pipes, a cement floor and a toilet located about three inches away from an internal cinder block wall. The location of the toilet means we can't drywall or tile the bathroom without bumping the wall out, which would block another doorway.So, our options for the bathroom were, a) rip everything out, move walls, plumbing, and spend several thousand dollars or b) paint the whole thing, replace some hardware and call it good enough. Yeah. We chose option B and it was the best two hundred bucks we've spent in a really long time. Ready to see a before photo? Gird yourself, it ain't pretty!Eek! I know, it was gross. And that photo was taken about halfway though painting the cinder block. When I told my friend Sandra about this project she said, "Oh, I didn't know you had a basement bathroom!" To which I replied, "Uh, yeah...that's because I would have died of embarrassment if you'd seen it!" Now, however, not so much. The power of paint always amazes me!The most time consuming part of the project was painting the cinder block walls, but the rest went pretty quickly, I painted the floor using Valspar porch and floor paint, then Jesse helped me put in a new faucet and toilet seat and hang a large mirror. He also used scrap lumber to whip up a little shelf to go over the toilet. Since drilling into cinder-block is a big pain, I hung a roll of toilet paper from some twine looped over an eye bolt. Honestly, I think it would be better located in front of the toilet, but so it will probably get moved. The shower surround and basin are also painted, but obviously that isn't a good long term solution. I'm thinking we might try to do a corrugated metal surround, like this.

So, that's the basement bathroom. A little paint, a couple new fixtures and accessories. It's not Elle Decor, but it's clean and bright and I'm kinda proud of it.